[LAD] Is RME HDSPe AES supported by alsa?

Reuben Martin reuben.m at gmail.com
Thu May 6 22:51:06 UTC 2010


Yo, back on Thursday 06 May 2010 Florian Faber was all like:
> Reuben,
> 
> > Alsa exposes all 64 matrix inputs as alsa ouputs, and I don't think
> > the windows driver does that. (Never played with the windows driver, so
> > I may be wrong about that)
> 
> Than that's a bug in the snd-hdspm driver.
> 
> > IIRC, they put such a huge matrix on it because they designed one
> > chip to slap on all their cards in that family. Saves money to just design
> > and fab one chip instead of a separate chip for each unit.
> 
> It is an FPGA, so it's just a piece of firmware. If it really works to
> pass along 64 playback channels instead of the 'official' 16 (I don't
> know, I don't have an AES card), I really wouldn't recommend using this.
> If one day the firmware gets modified to add new features, some now
> officially 'unused' multipliers might be re-used and things will break.
> After all, there is just a limited number of multipliers available.

I remember being a bit surprised when I first saw that there were 64 playback channels, but at the time I tried them all and I could route any of the 64 playback channels to any of the 16 outputs. Didn't think to test if there were limits to how many I could use at one time. But that was two years ago. Haven't had a chance to play with it since then. Have been thinking of getting one myself (or something similar) to replace the old RME 96/8 PAD I've been using for quite a while now.

-Reuben



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